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Health Financing

Making health care financially accessible to all is fundamental to improving health outcomes. Evidence shows that households in developing countries pay for more than half of all health care out of pocket. Such arrangements limit access to quality services and put patients at financial risk. Every year, more than 100 million people in low- and middle-income countries fall into poverty due to the cost of health care. Reducing out-of-pocket payments (or spreading them over longer periods of time) is critical to increasing access to quality health care and reducing financial hardship resulting from the cost of care.

Brokering partnerships between public and private purchasers of health services and private providers

Examples of our work

In 2013, Senegal launched a national program to achieve universal health coverage. SHOPS Plus is liaising with the government and the USAID-funded Health Systems Strengthening and Government Technical Assistance Provider projects to increase the representation of private providers in the country’s initiatives that promote universal health coverage. Project staff are helping private providers engage with government-subsidized mutual health associations (mutuelles) to cover priority health products and services.

To inform future USAID health investments in the Middle East and North Africa, the SHOPS Plus project and the Health Financing and Governance project conducted an analysis of the private health sector and the health financing landscape from January 2017 to April 2018. The countries included in this analysis are Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, the West Bank and Gaza, and Yemen.

In Tanzania, SHOPS Plus supported Edgepoint, Jubilee Insurance, and Vodacom to design and pilot a mobile phone-enabled private health insurance product, Jamii. It targets low-income households, including people living with HIV. Jamii provides benefits to offset costs associated with a hospitalization and offers limited benefits for outpatient care, as a complement to government-sponsored schemes.

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Sustaining Health Outcomes through the Private Sector (SHOPS) Plus is a five-year cooperative agreement (AID-OAA-A-15-00067) funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). This website is made possible by the generous support of the American people through USAID. The information provided on this website is not official U.S. government information and does not represent the views or positions of USAID or the U.S. government.